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Finding Slaves in Unexpected Places

Keeping Blacks in Bondage Was Not a Southern Monopoly

by James Breig

An early casualty of the Revolution was a runaway
slave, Crispus Attucks, killed by British soldiers in the "Boston Massacre."

AMONG THE MINUTEMEN
who turned out on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, to confront the British
and start the fight for American freedom was Prince Estabrook, a black man and
a slave. He was wounded in the shoulder. Five years before, runaway slave
Crispus Attucks was among five men slain by British soldiers in the Boston
Massacre, a confrontation he may have rashly initiated.

Some modern Americans
might guess that Estabrook and Attucks were southern slaves visiting New
England with their masters, but they were Massachusetts residents, two of the
hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in northern bondage during
the eighteenth century. In the early 1700s, slaves were one-sixth of
Philadelphia's population. A New York visitor around the time of the Revolution
said that "it rather hurts an European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the
street." At the time, there were as many as half a million slaves in the
northern colonies, about 20 percent of the population. When the newborn United
States took its first census in 1790, there were still more than 2,600 slaves
in Connecticut, nearly 9,000 in Delaware, 11,000-plus in New Jersey, and almost
22,000 in New York.

The history of northern slavery
almost exactly coincides with the 100 years of the eighteenth century, from an
increasing reliance on slave labor as the century dawned to New York's 1799 law
that set in motion the slow manumission of slaves in that state.

According to Leslie
M. Harris, an Emory University history professor, the first non–Native
American settler in Manhattan was a free black man: Jan Rodrigues, a sailor
marooned in 1613 by a Dutch vessel. Her book, In the Shadow of Slavery:
African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863, tells how Rodrigues married into an Indian tribe
and became a negotiator between it and Dutch traders. After Peter Minuit bought
Manhattan in 1626, more settlers arrived and brought eleven slaves with them—just
seven years after the first Africans landed in Virginia.

In 1664, when England
took control of New Netherland and renamed it New York, slavery expanded on a
rising need for cheap labor to improve the colony and the Duke of York's
financial interest in the Royal African Company, which ran the English slave
trade. Harris writes that between 1698 and 1738, New York's slave population
"increased at a faster rate than did the white population." In 1702, New Jersey
Governor Edward Cornbury was told by British authorities to make sure "a
constant and sufficient supply of merchantable Negroes" was available "at
moderate prices."

New
York adopted a law, above, regulating the movement of its slaves.

Though once the law
forbade the enslavement of black Christians, the exemption was written off the
books. Slavery was limited to African Americans. The number of slaves who could
congregate, and when, was restricted—rules that reflected white fear of
slave rebellions hatched at night by conspiratorial mobs of oppressed people.

Nevertheless, many
northern masters permitted their slaves to own property, to inherit from their
owners, and to cultivate small plots of land and sell the crops for spending
money or to purchase freedom. An indentured white man in the North said that he
and his peers had it worse than slaves because "they universally almost have
one day in seven whether to rest or to go to church or see their country
folks—but we are commonly compelled to work as hard every Sunday." Ira
Berlin, a University of Maryland history professor and author of Many
Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, writes that the work of northern slaves was less
demanding than the labor required on plantations in the Sugar Islands, the
Chesapeake region, and the Deep South. "The demand to produce" in those areas
was fierce, he said, and slaves were "pressed to work many more hours with
fewer days off." Southern and Caribbean plantation owners "could work slaves to
death and purchase more," Berlin said. The annual mortality rate on some sugar
plantations rose to 17 percent. Berlin called the plantations "killing
machines."

Most northern slaves
worked on farms, but some were skilled at trades, trained in tailoring,
sailmaking, carpentry, and such. Others toiled in tanning factories, iron
manufacturing, and fishing. Some were permitted to arrange for their own sale,
a concession that allowed them to reunite with relatives or to find kinder
masters. New Yorker Aaron Burr's mother, Esther, wrote in a letter that "our
Negroes are gone to seek a master. Really ...I shall be thankful if I can
get rid of them."

North and south, America's
founders had a commitment to human rights and to slaves. Pennsylvania's
Benjamin Franklin, Massachusetts's John Hancock, and New York's John Jay, for
example, owned people. Like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they
recognized the contradiction between advancing the cause of freedom and holding
slaves, and they sought to resolve it.

Interpreter Richard Josey portrays one of many slaves who escaped in cities,
as notices for their return attest.

Northern
slaves often worked in trades: interpreter Christine Lane as a
seamstress; view an additional image of Christine Lane

Franklin, who owned
and sold slaves, slowly came to appreciate the innate equality of all people.
He theorized that the northern colonies expanded more rapidly because they had
fewer slaves than the South. He said "slaves rather weaken than strengthen the
state." He spoke of the "constant butchery of the human species by this
pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men."

Franklin's opinion
derived from festering antipathy toward England and its slave trade, a
philosophical movement that championed the rights of all human beings, and the
Great Awakening and other religious upheavals.

Many Americans found
in the slave trade a reason to despise their mother country. In 1774, Jay, a
slave owner, said England was an "advocate for slavery and oppression."
Slaveholder Jefferson wrote in a draft of the Declaration of Independence that
George III's support of the slave trade was "a cruel war against human nature"
and another justification for separation from England. Southern colonies,
however, saw to it that the language was deleted. At the 1787 constitutional
convention, Franklin favored a clause to ban the slave trade; when southern
states objected, the ban was delayed for twenty years.

A consequence of
opposing slave trading was opposition to slavery. It was becoming obvious that
it was hypocritical of America to fault Great Britain for trafficking in slaves
while oppressing people. "To contend for liberty and to deny that blessing to
others involves an inconsistency not to be excused," Jay said. He was echoed by
Massachusetts's Abigail Adams, who wrote in 1775 that it had "always appeared a
most iniquitous scheme to me" to demand for ourselves "what we are daily
robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we
have." Such sentiments echoed the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu,
and other Enlightenment philosophers, who taught that all humans had natural
rights. Montesquieu said slavery not only degraded the enslaved but corrupted
the enslavers. Smith, writing from an economic perspective, saw slavery as a
hindrance to economic and individual progress.

Such views were mirrored
in religious sentiments against slavery. Many Quakers who had been slaveholders
in the first part of the 1700s shifted to abolition during the Revolution,
enlarging an emancipation movement that had been percolating in the
denomination for decades. John Woolman, a prominent member of the Society of
Friends, said, "I believe slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the
Christian religion."

In Philadelphia at
the start of the Revolution, Quakers founded the Society for Promoting
Abolition of Slavery and Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Franklin
would become its president in 1787. In Pennsylvania and New York, Quaker
congregations began to expel slave owners. Methodists, on fire from the
revivalist Great Awakening, came to see God's love and freedom as universals,
and preachers set out to convert blacks. Methodists voted to remove
slaveholders from church membership.

The antislavery
influences of the Revolution, philosophy, and religion came together in Jay's
1780 remark that unless the new nation moved toward emancipation, its "prayers
to Heaven for Liberty will be impious."

Something more earthly bolstered such
prayers: the pressing need for troops to fight the enemy. "African Americans
viewed the war as an opportunity to break the bonds of slavery," said Martin
Blatt, chief of cultural resources at Boston National Historical Park. "It
signaled the beginning of freedom."

Lord Dunmore, British
governor of Virginia, offered freedom to enslaved men if their masters were in
revolt against the crown and if they repaired to his standard. His proposal
attracted hundreds of blacks.

At first, General
Washington forbade the use of slaves in the American military because it would
inflame southerners, ever fearful of slave uprisings. In 1779, Alexander
Hamilton wrote to Jay, president of the Continental Congress, recommending the
American ban be reversed. It was, and as many as 5,000 blacks—slave and
free—served in the rebel army and navy. One observer wrote: "You never
see a regiment in which there are not negroes."

When the war ended,
the slaves who had fought on both sides expected freedom as their reward, a
move that Hamilton had anticipated in his letter to Jay: "An essential part of
the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets."

New Hampshire slave
Prince Whipple and others petitioned the legislature for freedom. They said
that "justice, humanity, and the rights of mankind" demanded an end to slavery.
It would be four years before New Hampshire acted, but Vermont moved quickly and
freed its slaves in 1777. Soon, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
Rhode Island began gradual emancipation. By the 1790 census, there were no
slaves to be counted in Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Full emancipation in
the slaveholding northern states came in fits and starts. Connecticut, for
example, considered emancipation bills in 1777, 1779, and 1780 before adopting
a gradual emancipation law in 1784. In 1799, New York passed legislation that
extended the emancipation process into the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. "Nobody wanted to quit" slave owning, Berlin wrote. The "commitment to
slavery ran very deep" among slave owners in the North, "even when it
contradicted their ideology...Slavery was not a minor institution, and it
took enormous energy and about fifty years to end it. It didn't go easily."

But some
slaves did. Slaves in the North could
walk away from their masters with
relative ease. Because so many lived in urban areas, Berlin said, they could
move around. "Fleeing slavery," said Shane White of the University of Sydney,
"depended on having a free black population into which one could disappear. It
was a lot easier in the north with New York, New Haven and Philadelphia than
in South Carolina."

To some slaves, that
mobility meant slipping out at night to a tavern or gambling den and coming
home again. To others, it meant meeting with free blacks and sympathetic whites
to lay plans for manumission. It could even mean hitting the open road. A
window was an invitation to freedom, and many slaves took it. Berlin refers to
an estimate that "between half and three-quarters of the young slave men in
Philadelphia absconded from their owners during the 1780s." By just leaving in
the night, slaves could melt into the North's large population of free blacks,
seek refuge among Indian tribes, light out for Canada, or enlist as merchant
seamen with the expectation that few questions would be asked on the waves.

Many blacks did
something more than free themselves: they agitated for freedom for their peers.
"Without the initiatives of free black and slaves," Berlin wrote, "they
wouldn't have had emancipation." African Americans had allies in politicians,
clergymen, and newspapers that a few decades earlier had advertised slave auctions
and printed notices for the capture of runaways.

Among the slaves
who spoke out for freedom was Phillis Wheatley. Bought as a child on Boston's
docks, and given her first name from the ship that had carried her from Africa
and her second from the family that owned her, Wheatley had gifts for learning
and poetry. Her verse impressed Voltaire and Franklin, and led her to London to
meet admirers. In 1774, two Boston newspapers printed a letter from her that
included these lines: "In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle,
which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for
Deliverance."

Blacks also had the
support of a slave who was content to remain in bondage because of his age.
Jupiter Hammon, a Long Island slave, penned "An Address to the Negroes of the
State of New-York" in the late 1780s. He quoted St. Paul's advice to slaves to
obey their masters, not to steal from them, and to avoid profanity. But Hammon
called liberty "a great thing, and worth seeking for." His pointed out how
whites defended their liberty during the Revolution, and he asked: "How much
money has been spent, and how many lives has been lost, to defend their
liberty? I have hoped that God would open their eyes ...to think of the
state of the poor blacks, and to pity us." Blacks could help that happen, he
wrote, if they made sure "to lead quiet and peaceable lives in all Godliness
and honesty," an example that would persuade whites that slaves could live on
their own.

Such an example was
given by Nero Hawley, a Connecticut slave who survived Valley Forge. When he
gained his freedom in 1782, he returned to his home state, took up brickmaking,
and collected his war pension. Nearing sixty, he died a veteran, a tradesman,
and a free American of the North.

Prince Estabrook also
went free. For fighting in the Revolution he won his liberty by 1790, and lived
until 1830, dying at age ninety.

James Breig, an Albany, New York, editor and writer, contributed a story about
eighteenth-century optics to the summer 2005 journal.